Getting ready for her new assignment on the Today show, Meredith Vieira shares her private side — from the crisis that made her marriage stronger to why her kids think she's a mess

Though it's a mild, sunny day, it would be entirely understandable if Meredith Vieira arrived for lunch in a snit. She'd planned to have a driver take her to the restaurant where we're meeting, inside New York City's Central Park, but barricades blocked the roads. So the soon-to-be co-anchor of the Today show, succeeding Katie Couric as the woman who wakes up America, has been forced to hike a quarter mile along the park's looping, confusing paths — in black stiletto heels.

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But as she strolls into the restaurant, dressed in cream-colored slacks and a snug knit top, she is unshaken. "I walked here," she says in that familiar throaty voice, her smile warm, her green eyes direct. She sounds calm, even amused by her little misadventure.

Vieira lacks even the accessories of celebrity — no sunglasses, no BlackBerry. She does not even carry a purse. She holds only a cell phone, which she politely keeps turned off for the next two hours while she talks about the work she loves and the rich, challenging family life she loves even more. Vieira has had nine years of exposure on The View, the wildly successful ABC morning chat show she moderated until last May. She's also spent four years hosting the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And, as any fan of The View knows, she has three children and a husband of 20 years, television producer and writer Richard Cohen, whose health problems have been openly discussed by Vieira in the past.

Vieira will turn 53 in December, and she has the laugh lines and creases to prove it (she has said she'd like to avoid plastic surgery for now). Today she is wearing thick television pancake makeup, but only because she hasn't had a chance to scrub it off yet. Sometimes she forgets and finds herself at her suburban supermarket, looking, she jokes, "like a washed-up prostitute." This is pure Vieira and a large part of her huge appeal: She's a mix of stunning and soulful, a beauty with a big mouth and a warm heart.

Settling in at the table, Vieira instantly reveals herself as a woman who is not in the habit of lunching out. "What's in a Cobb salad?" she asks of the entrée that appears, it seems, on the lunch menu of every New York City restaurant. Told its ingredients — chicken, blue cheese, and bacon, among others — she orders one. (Later, a fellow patron will use the salad as an excuse to approach Vieira, asking her about its contents. Vieira patiently describes the salad in detail and clearly makes the diner's day.)

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Off camera, Vieira is busy raising three teenagers — Ben, 17, Gabe, 15, and Lily, 13. They are one big reason she has enjoyed her tenure on The View — there has been virtually no travel, and the hours have allowed her to get home in time to drive them to various after-school commitments. Without their blessing, she would never have considered taking the Today show job, as plum an assignment as it is. The prospect of being beloved by early-morning millions is certainly not a bad feeling — nor is the reported $40 million she'll earn over four years. But, she insists, "my decisions have always been connected to my family, because if it doesn't work with the family, it's not going to work. Maybe you've gotten more pay at another job...but if you're miserable at home every night, it's not worth it."

So when it came time to decide whether to leave The View for the Today show, "I didn't do it lightly," she says. "I didn't do it lightly at all." She mulled over the offer for six months — though she knows some may find that baffling. "A lot of people said to me, 'Why would you think twice?' The salary, the reputation...I'm not saying those things don't matter — certainly, I'm a breadwinner in my family," she says. "But that's never been why I do something."

Yet Vieira admits she was flattered by the idea of following Couric — "I thought, Do they know how old I am?" — and impressed with Matt Lauer, her future cohost. Invited to dinner at his apartment last December so the two of them could take each other's measure, she debated about what to wear before opting for comfort: jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black jacket. On the subject of clothes, she jokes, "I don't own any." Vieira never goes shopping and has, she says, absolutely no interest in keeping up appearances. "I'm kind of a tomboy," she says, "and I was never a girly girl in my life." To Vieira's relief, Lauer answered the door in jeans and a sweater and immediately offered her a glass of wine. Vieira recalls, "I thought, I love him already."

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Still, as she weighed her options, "I spent a lot of time in the fetal position, crying," Vieira says. She was daunted by the job's early-morning and early-to-bed hours, as well as by the breaking-news intensity and globe-trotting assignments. But one of the main reasons for tears was "a real fear of change," she says. "Fear of failure. Fear of success." At The View, she had "nice hours and an easy life. There's a real camaraderie and a comfort factor when you know one another," she says, sounding wistful.

"Meredith does not like change, to say the least," says her husband. "It does not sit well with her. She had warm feelings for all the people she worked with. But I felt, and the kids felt, that it was a wonderful opportunity for her. It was time for her to spread her wings — which is something she preaches to the kids on a regular basis," he says. "Let me give you a list of the people who doubt that she'll do a great job: Meredith. That's the end of the list. Everyone else thinks that she was born to take this job. She has so hit her stride that she could do it backward and left-handed. I wish she had half the confidence in herself that other people have in her."

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Vieira readily admits to being a chronic worrier. "It makes me want to kill her," her husband says cheerfully. The notion of being ill-prepared is always on her mind. She is a woman who, in her first years at The View, would do research "for hours," she says. "Richard would say, 'Wait a minute. Miss Piggy is the guest tomorrow. What are you studying?' It was just this feeling of: I won't know enough, I won't know enough."

Her children "were much more levelheaded" about her new gig than she was, Vieira says. "They really helped me think it through. I remember sitting with my son Gabe and saying, 'I won't be there in the morning.' And he was like, 'What are you talking about? We're not six years old. All we do is fight in the morning.'" Her oldest, Ben, used the same advice she had given him when he switched to a new school and knew no one. "He said, 'You told me that it would be hard but I'd come out of it better — and I think you will too.' He saw it as something really exciting."

As for her youngest child, Lily, "her attitude was always 'Don't let anybody tell you what to do. You do what makes you happy,'" Vieira says. "And when I was really starting to panic, she sent me a beautiful e-mail." It read: "No matter what, we love you. If you take the job, we love you. If you don't take the job, we love you." When Vieira read the note, she burst into tears. "Lily just said, 'God, you're a mess.'"

When Vieira finally said yes to Today last April, it was agreed that she could be somewhat choosy about when she travels — but she is also excited about bringing her family on some trips. (Ben has been studying Chinese, and the prospect of Vieira's covering the next Olympics, in Beijing, was hugely appealing.) On The View, she talked about her family constantly — which her kids did not always appreciate once they became adolescents. "You know, they're teenagers, and they're very protective of themselves," she explains. The Today show calls for less anecdote sharing, and this seems right to Vieira.

Now that her decision has been made, Vieira has traded in fear for a cheerful fatalism. "People said, 'You don't want to be the one to follow Katie. It's like being Deborah Norville, the one to follow Jane Pauley — it's jinxed.' Well, we'll find out. Maybe it is," she says with a shrug. "That'll be interesting."

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Advice from Couric herself has helped. After Vieira officially took the position, the two of them spoke. Vieira reports that Couric asked, "Are you getting tons of people saying, 'Oh my God, the pressure you're going to be under! How are you going to do this job?' Why do people actually take the time to ask things like that? What is that about?"

Vieira found that reassuring. But she was taught to be strong from an early age. She was raised in East Providence, Rhode Island, with three older brothers. "I was always kind of a tough cookie because I had them," she says. "I was much more aligned with their way of thinking." Her mother, a homemaker, and father, a doctor, were both first-generation Portuguese-Americans. Most of her father's patients were Portuguese immigrants; many of them paid him in homemade port wine or by doing chores. "Suddenly there would be a stranger in the yard, mowing the lawn. I'd say to my mom, 'Who's that?' She'd say, 'Oh, that's Mario. He's Daddy's patient.'"

Her parents sent Vieira's three brothers to a Quaker boys' school and Vieira to its sister school, which she loved. "It was extremely empowering," she says with a smile, "almost too much so. Our senior year, we took classes at the boys' school, and we would come out of class going, 'What idiots.'"

School may have made a difference, but her parents were her inspiration. Her mother was a "June Cleaver mother — there were always cookies being baked," but she was fiercely opinionated as well, a die-hard Republican and "always outspoken." Her mother never said she wished she herself had a career, but "I think that she wanted more for me," says Vieira. "She was always pushing me to get out there and be something. Especially as a rebellious teenager, I thought, I don't want to end up like you, around the house. It wasn't until I had children that I began to see that she was everything I wanted to be. I was fortunate enough to be able to say that to her before she died," at 90 years old, two years ago. "She died in her bed. I was holding her in my arms. All her kids were with her," she says softly. "It was just the way she wanted to go. I should be so lucky.'"

Her father was "a great man," quieter than her mother, but an example nonetheless. When a 20-something Vieira was fired from an early on-air job at a Providence television station, she went home and cried in her room. "My dad said, 'Do you believe you have no value?' I said yes. And he answered, 'Then why should anyone else believe that you do?' So the next day, I marched back into the office and said, 'I'm going to prove you wrong.'" The news director agreed to give her a second chance. "Maybe he hadn't seen that backbone," she says proudly. "He saw it that day." A few months later, she was "discovered" when a headhunter was passing through Providence and caught Vieira on a broadcast.

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Many years later, after earning fame as a network news reporter for CBS, Vieira stood up for herself again. In 1989, as a coanchor of CBS's 60 Minutes, she negotiated a part-time schedule to accommodate her desire to spend time with her first baby — a schedule that did not sit well with the men who ran the show. When Vieira, pregnant with her second child, declined an assignment that required flying, her bosses lost patience. By 1991, she was out. "It was a tough time," she says, but she doesn't regret the outcome at all. "The prestige, the money, the whole thing," she says, "at the end of the day, that didn't matter."

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Working less over the next few years allowed her the time with her kids that she coveted, and then The View came along. Nevertheless, as Barbara Walters says now, "The View was an unknown quantity, and so was Meredith," who would be trying her wings outside the news arena. But Vieira took to it straightaway; after 20 years of delivering just the facts, she suddenly had an opportunity to blab away about anything she liked. "I wouldn't shut up," she says of her earlier days. "I was so out there — anything that I thought came out of my mouth." Vieira may cringe at her earlier candor, but Walters has nothing but praise for her former cohost: "She's very dear to us. She lives in a beautiful home, but she is personally unmaterialistic. She cries if you kill a cockroach — we always tease her about that. We have mice here in the studio; I scream about them, and Meredith wants to take them home on a leash."

That beautiful home, in a suburb along the Hudson River, has undergone a major, year-long renovation lately. The overhaul did not make the house larger as much as rearrange rooms so that the kitchen and family room captured the best light. Previously, Vieira explains, the best-lit area had been the front of the house, near the driveway. "Richard and I would sit in our driveway on Sunday, reading the paper, basically in our underwear," she says. "People would walk past us with their dogs. It was very Beverly Hillbillies."

Thanks to her candid comments on The View and her husband's own memoir, millions of people are aware that Vieira's husband lives with multiple sclerosis (MS), diagnosed when he was 25, and has endured two recent bouts of colon cancer. Now Vieira is grateful for even the simplest pleasures. She is looking forward to a two-week break and will, she says, just putter around at home. As for hobbies, "I knit, but I've been knitting a scarf for a year," she says. "I can't stick with anything." She loves to hike and run, although it saddens her that her husband, whose MS has made walking more difficult and who is now legally blind, can no longer join her. "That was something we loved to do together," she says quietly. "I hate that we can't anymore."

For the moment, however, their dark days are apparently behind them. In 2004, Cohen wrote a moving and wrenchingly honest best seller, Blindsided: A Reluctant Memoir, about the effects of his illnesses on himself and on his family. In the book, he gives a harrowing description of his despair and rage after his two bouts of cancer, in 1999 and again 11 months later. He is now in remission. "I wanted to leave [him] sometimes," Vieira told Walters when she and Cohen sat down for a 20/20 interview two years ago. Now, says Cohen, "I can't say it's as if it never happened, but pages have turned. Things have lightened up." Today, at lunch, Vieira jokes about her husband's blindness: "I think he's faking. Somehow, he can still spot a beautiful woman, and he still beats me when we play pool." Though Cohen walks with a cane and has trouble carrying things — "there are days that are terrible," Vieira admits — "we try to laugh about it as much as we can." Meanwhile, she takes solace in knowing that "if four years from now I decided, All right, that's enough," the family would be secure enough financially that she could quit and care for her husband if it eventually became necessary.

As she leaves the restaurant, a beaming older woman calls to her, "Hey, Meredith!" Vieira responds, "Hi, how are you?" as warmly as if she were greeting an old friend. On Fifth Avenue, outside the park, there is another older woman, this one dressed in rags, sitting in the street, leaning against the curb. Vieira watches to see if she has fallen — but, no, it seems she has just decided to sit there awhile. "That breaks my heart," says Vieira. But then her heart is pulled in a different direction. Her cell phone, which she has turned back on, has begun to ring, and it's her son on the line. It's time to answer the call and go home.